Making the Transformational Moment in Film

by Dan Fleming

  The incomprehensibility attains its visual apotheosis in a bank of TV screens that Griffin encounters as they hurry through the streets after clambering ashore. Both captivating and then shocking, the TV screens almost hypnotize Griffin. A hawk swoops on its prey. A nuclear submarine appears with a commentary about how, in effect, there is nowhere to hide from the realities of the modern world, not even in some remote place in the hope of remaining detached and uninvolved. The parallels between Griffin's medieval world and isolationist pockets of the modern world become clear. Then the stylized figure of the Grim Reaper swings his scythe in an infomercial about AIDS. Griffin, having touched the screens in momentary engrossment, turns and runs from the spectacle.

  Of the four examples just discussed, each embodying in different ways the film's own transformation rule, the encounter with the nuclear submarine is especially interestingly placed within the film's narrative structure, as it represents a second act near-death experience. In terms of narrative, this kind of moment crystallizes the gap between expectations and results in the middle of a film, emphasizing how strong the resistance really is to what the protagonists want to achieve.

  It is also, though, worth considering exactly how this scene is internally constructed, as it represents not only the film's main transformation rule in action but an instance of what we have earlier identified as a traumatic reversal of the gaze.

  In a 27-shot set-piece, the film organizes the space of the encounter in a very specific and carefully controlled way (left), even though the visual effect on screen is deliberately chaotic. The first shot in the segment we are concentrating on is the one reproduced on the previous pages – a very low angle “bobbing” shot from the surface of the water, showing the white horse particularly clearly in side profile in the darkness. This camera position is returned to five shots in to the segment and again in shot 27, though by then the submarine itself has appeared. These shots initiate the growing feeling that Griffin and the others are being watched.

  All the non-identified shots interspersed through our numbering series on the left are of Griffin and the others gazing out into the darkness, trying to see what is initially only a disturbance in the water. So the labeling on the diagram identifies the shots that are looking at them, so to speak. These shots move progressively round one side of the boat, though with some cutting back to earlier camera positions for visual continuity. So the camera in effect shifts in a series of steps until it has taken up a position off the rear of the boat, which is exactly where the submarine reappears. Almost subliminally, it becomes apparent that position 1/5 (top left) was in effect a periscope view from the submerged submarine. In fact a mirror image shot (25) is used just before the submarine surfaces and looms over them. And at that point the elevated camera position at 28, looking down at the boat, makes it retrospectively clear that in effect we have been seeing them from the submarine's point of view. In one sense, none of this is unusual. We have seen water-level shots ostensibly from periscope point of view in numerous war films, and the “stalking” effect is even a little reminiscent of Jaws (indeed shot 4, not illustrated here, looks up at the keel of the little boat from deep below it in an homage to Spielberg's dramatic use of this angle). But here it is an unusually impersonal point of view (no crewman peering through the periscope, nobody on the conning tower), as if the machine itself is doing the watching.

  And in the context of the film's insistent emphasis on what the protagonists are seeing, this reversal of their gaze feels especially powerful.

  The USS Queenfish (inset photograph on opposite page) was a nuclear attack submarine of some notoriety after its Cold War operations became known about. It clandestinely mapped the previously uncharted sea routes under the polar ice pack and along the Siberian coastline for military purposes should war occur between the Soviet Union and the West. During the Cold War, the Arctic ice pack on top of the world became a covert theater of operation for nuclear missile-carrying submarines from both superpowers. The Arctic cartographer who becomes a mission planner for the bombing of cities in Map of the Human Heart is an unsettling echo of the Queenfish.

  In The Navigator, the transition from a protected pocket of medieval Cumbria to the realization of Griffin's vision out in the world is also a transition from black and white to color.

  * * *

  Ward (1989), x. Biddick (1998), 34

  Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) offers this small but rather comprehensive master class in lighting and color (above). Scottie, the ex-detective played by James Stewart, is following Madeleine (Kim Novak) at the request of her husband, a wealthy businessman and old college friend of Scottie's. Madeleine has, it seems, been behaving strangely – going for long drives and wandering aimlessly around San Francisco. This is early in the film and Scottie follows her through a backalley entrance into what turns out to be a flower shop.

  The director and the cinematographer Robert Burks (a Hitchcock regular) light Stewart in the gloomy storeroom between alley and shop with classic key and fill lights. The key, towards which Stewart is oriented, provides overall illumination, especially on his face, while the fill brings up detail in the shadow on the other side of his face. This is not quite the classic three-point lighting setup of the textbooks though, as the diffuse light in the “alley” area behind the set is used instead to frame Stewart where a backlight might have been used to pick out the edges of his form and separate it from the background. But as Scottie moves into the storeroom Stewart moves out of the key light into the shadows and a backlight is used to pick out his outline, with only pale illumination on the wall behind to maintain a sense of depth to the space.

  Then when Scottie slowly opens the door through which Madeleine has gone, a strong key light without fill is used to represent the light flooding in from the flower shop. And as the door opens, seen now from Scottie's point of view, a blaze of intense color from the massed flowers fills the screen, amidst which we now see Madeleine. As she turns, Kim Novak is given the three-point lighting treatment, with key, fill and backlight modeling her figure and lifting if off the background. The final shot here is one of Hitchcock's moments of visual showmanship, as he places a mirror beside the door so that we see both Scottie's secretive vantage point and Madeleine as he gazes at her.

  Although there is of course a very great deal more to lighting than this, it remains useful to think of this scene as a kind of primer. As lighting technology has changed, the basic notions of “key,” “fill” and “back” lights have been converted into various combinations of specific lighting units for particular situations, correlated with choice of film stock or the digital medium being used. The “fill” is often various sorts of reflector or “bead board,” the “key” might be natural light or banks of lighting units, with carefully placed “cross keys” illuminating different characters, depending on the color palette and the look required. On-screen source lighting within a scene will often be part of the mix. Filtering and diffusion of various kinds may be used in front of lighting units to modulate their effects. A number of excellent textbooks (especially Benjamin Bergery's Reflections, Jacqueline B. Frost's Cinematography for Directors and Alexander Ballinger's New Cinematographers) provide the levels of detail that will be skimmed over here. However, this basic example has the virtue that it reminds us of some fundamental principles. What we see Burks and Hitchcock do here, over a matter of only seconds and two or three shots, is constantly fine-tune and adjust the relationships between lighting and color. So whatever the technical tools being used, the basic notion of “tuning” these relationships remains valid. In the Vertigo example, the relatively low intensity of the fill light in relation to the key in the first shot, the absence of backlight and of general illumination in the space create a low-key look, whereas moments later the key, fill and backlight are brought into a more equally balanced contrast ratio and, along with general illumination of the scene, create a high-key look that emphasizes the saturated colors. Art direction, costume design
and make-up provide the on-screen materials on the basis of which the cinematographer's tuning of light produces the color that we respond to: Madeleine's cool gray suit contrasting with the intensity of the flowers, Scottie's dark coat and hat merging with the shadows.

  Once this kind of visual “tuning” or relative adjustment of elements is in place, no matter what the contemporary tuning tools being deployed in the specific instance, it becomes possible to think about light and color in ways that are less tied to specific techniques and technologies. In particular, we want to think about the intensity of the visual experience being created through the use of light and color. Intensity is the real point of the Vertigo example. In front of the cinema screen we are almost knocked back in our seats by the shift from low-key in the top row of frames to the intensity of the visual field revealed in the second row of frames. Placing Madeleine within that intensity is communicating something about Scottie's growing fascination, as well as about whatever it is that simmers just below her cool exterior. (It should be noted that Bernard Herrmann's score makes its own contribution to the intensity at precisely this moment, but we will come back to music in due course.)

  In terms of color, what we mean by “intensity” is a product of ratcheting up the scale on any or all of the three axes indicated in the color field diagram: hue, saturation and value. When we see color anywhere, not just in film, we are seeing colored light. And what we term “color” is the interaction of these three components: hue, which is in effect the “rainbow” subdivided into all its distinguishable differences (based on the wavelengths of light); saturation, which is the degree of brightness or paleness of a hue (like pouring more or less colored paint into a white base paint); and value, which is the degree of “grayness” or otherwise (like a black and white photograph with various shades of gray on which hues then get overlaid). Different kinds of intensity – which is to say different sensations of intensity on the part of the viewer – are created by ratcheting up any one of these scales. In interaction, they form the powerful expressive means of visual communication that we experience as color.

  So the pre-visualization artwork for Vincent's (unrealized) version of Alien3(top left above), while very limited in its range of hues and relatively limited in terms of saturation (except for the shadows), achieves its striking intensity on the value scale. The underlying range of grays in the image runs the full gamut from nearly black to nearly white, something this “look” shares with classic German Expressionist cinema (such as Pandora's Box (1929), above left). Value exists independently of hue (think of adding those blues from Alien3 on top of the Pandora's Box image), so affords an underlying expressive layer of considerable potency. As we increase the range of hue and boost the saturation – like “pouring” more red into Avik's hat in the frame from Map of the Human Heart – we start to code the visual field. In other words, increasingly specific meanings begin to suggest themselves on the level of color. In this instance, Avik's hat marks him out as different in the Arctic world of grays, blues and whites, a difference that at this moment gets literalized when he coughs red blood onto Walter's face and we realize he has tuberculosis.

  In Navigator, when Ulf gets stuck in the middle of the modern highway, the saturated reds of the torches reflect off the wet roadway and the speeding cars to underpin with an intense visual sensation the equally intense psychological moment that we imagine him to be having. So just these few examples are enough to demonstrate the three axes of color operating both independently and in concert.

  But it is important to note that color is also in our minds. The white horse in Fritz Lang's Siegfried (1924, middle left) stands out in our minds as much because of the idea of a white horse, an idea that has its own kind of intensity. Similarly, the white horse cantering unexpectedly down the highway in Fellini's Roma (1972) is an unforgettably vivid image even though the actual screen image is all desaturated hues in rather insipid natural light. The intensity in these instances is in large measure a psychological sensation just as much as it is a literally visual one.

  The white horse has cultural associations that contribute to this response (mythological versions appear around the world), but color on its own as it were also needs to be understood as having a psychology. Whatever shortcomings the much-quoted Rorschach “inkblot” tests might have as tools of psychological investigation, the tenth and last card in the set (Card X, reproduced here) is still a revealing reminder of the suggestive power of color.

  It is more or less impossible not to respond to Card X. Look at it and see if you can prevent yourself from having feelings about it. Even before people start to “see” crabs, lobsters, spiders, snakes, rabbits' heads, caterpillars, seahorses, the Eiffel Tower, a spine and pelvic bones or any number of other things, they are having what we may take to be a series of emotional responses as they scan the color field (although we are going to be more careful in due course about distinguishing emotion and affect). Visual shapes are what start to give form to the “seeing” of things in the image (as with the predominantly black-and-white cards in the Rorschach set as a whole), but the colors here are what trigger the immediate feelings, before any imagined representations of things start to take over as one looks at Card X.

  And some “representations” if they occur – like broken eggs with blood – then start to reclaim the color in ways that many people begin to find uncomfortable. It is not too difficult to generate in oneself a small maelstrom of feelings just by looking long enough at Card X, although equally some people can gaze contentedly at it for a long time and see only pretty pastel colors. Whatever way you are tending, there is still perhaps no better example of the affective nature of color sensations. We want to say affective here – rather than psychological or emotional – because any other vocabulary conspires too quickly with the representational appropriation of the sensation. “Psychological” moves too quickly towards representing and labeling supposed states of mind (which after all is what the original Rorschach test is for), while “emotional” moves too quickly into telling stories about what we feel. (“That's disgusting” is a story wanting to be told.) The term affect, on the other hand, identifies an important pre-representational and non-verbalized layer of response on which these other elaborations are then built.

  The interaction of color-based and affective intensity is a powerful aspect of human response to the visual. Surprisingly, the interrelation of cinema's represented and affective worlds has not been much studied and may not yet be fully understood, although directors such as Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky and Alain Resnais and cinematographers such as Sven Nykvist and Rodrigo Prieto have used color in ways that suggest an especially deep intuitive grasp of the affective dimension. (Of course many more have deployed color “symbolically” in films, with this character wearing red for “passion” and that scene looking desaturated to suggest “depression” but such rather literal understandings of the affective world on film are perhaps the more cliche-prone end of the spectrum.)

  When French urban scenographers Skertzo (Hélène Richard and Jean-Michel Quesne) devised a high-tech digital laser projection system to recreate the medieval paintwork on the front of Amiens Cathedral (right top), they revived a lost affective dimension in our response to such a building, normally experienced as gray stone. They refer to the “beacon” effect that the color creates before any specific religious representations take over. The cathedral's Portal of the Virgin quickly re-introduces its dense religious iconography, but Richard and Quesne are right that the color when present seems to come first (partly because visible from a distance where represented detail cannot be discerned with any clarity). The affective dimension to this is undeniable when experienced. The palette of hues and the rich saturation produce an intensity that is then only secondarily channeled into Christian representations of prophets and angels.

  This representational channeling of the intensity that light and color can affectively generate is one key to under
standing the great European tradition of Romantic painting, as exemplified (p. 148) by Caspar David Friedrich's Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (1830s). Although reproduction does not capture the particular intensity of the light in this painting (the original is in the Old National Gallery in Berlin), enough of the sensation is reproducible here to make the point that affect, once produced, is available to be channeled in ways which rapidly turn into narrative that borrows or inherits the feeling of intensity.

  The painting is a considerable step up in terms of representational specifics from Rorschach's Card X, but again we can test our own response to it. This time, the question is whether you can resist the entry of story into the visual field. It is very difficult not to wonder who the man and woman are. Do you start to imagine the man as somewhat older? Is she his daughter? Are they traveling further into this landscape? Or do they seem poised on the edge of a different landscape, perhaps a “spiritual” one? At this point a tradition of narratives about spiritual journeys starts to infiltrate our response to the picture, a tradition invoked by German Expressionist printmaker Ernst Barlach in these details (left) showing the man alone in the landscape as a metaphor for the human spiritual condition or the spiritual traveler treading on the heads of lost souls.

  All of this connects with our present purpose, of course, when we think of Robin Williams playing this man. If we “narrativize” the Friedrich painting by taking the woman away (let us say she is his daughter and she has died), and we add something of the anxiety (as well as the specific imagery) from the Barlach prints, we are in the worlds of What Dreams May Come (1998). I say “worlds” because I want to hold on to the idea of both represented and affective worlds. The represented world of What Dreams May Come is regrettably mawkish at the level of classical narrative exposition. But the affective world is an extraordinary experiment with the limits of visual – and especially color-based – intensity. As such, the remarkable visual excess leaves the pedestrian exposition of story far behind and reveals a post-classical sensibility at odds with its classical Hollywood narrative form.